Archived News:

Monday, Oct 28, 2013

Here's a reveal trailer
for Call of Duty: Ghosts Extinction, a 1-4 player cooperative game mode
for the upcoming military shooter sequel. They describe Extinction as "a unique
blend of fast-paced survival action, FPS base defense, scavenging and class
leveling," and this also has sci-fi flair, as it shows soldiers fighting off
waves of what look like Borderlands skags. Continue here to read the full story.

Facebook page for
Walking Dead: The Game teases plans for a second season for Telltale's
episodic adventure series based on the zombie series. There's not much on this
for now, but they offer the URL for their
The Walking Dead website
and tomorrow's date, suggesting a full announcement will come at around 3:00 pm
EDT. Thanks Phillip.

The Slitherine website is now
accepting signups to beta test Fortress Metz, a new expansion for
Battle Academy, which is coming to the Windows, OS X, and iOS editions of
the World War II strategy game as an in-app purchase. Here's word:

Metz,
located in Lorraine, has been for centuries an historic garrison town. After its
annexation to Germany following the Battle of France in 1940, it became a
stronghold for the Third Reich and a major target for the Allied forces.
Following the Normandy landings, the U.S. Third Army under the command of
General George S. Patton attacked the city fortifications and, after four months
of fighting, broke through and freed Metz from occupation in late 1944.

Soon you will be able to relive those days in the latest expansion of one of the
most critically-acclaimed tactical wargames, Battle Academy: Fortress Metz. With
new Panzer Brigades and units like the German Jagdpanzer IV/70, the Hummel,
Sdkfz 234/1 armored cars and more, Fortress Metz is a must-have
expansion!

An
update on Kickstarter from ROAM is called "How to Steal," as it calls out
505 Games for allegedly using their game ideas for How to Survive, and
noting that prior to publishing How to Survive, 505 had been in touch with them
about publishing ROAM. We have contacted 505 Games for a comment about this, but
have not yet received a reply. Meanwhile, a
follow-up
update (thanks nin) for ROAM apologizes for making this a public dispute,
and says they are moving forward with no plans to pursue this further. Finally,
a third ROAM Kickstarter update from just moments ago allows that this may
all be "the craziest coincidence" the ROAM developer has ever experienced.
Here's a bit:

So, after this thing has blown up so big it’s been brought
to my attention that on a French website "How to Survive" had existed under a
different name, "Monster Island". A title being developed in France. 505 games
picked up "Monster Island" and renamed it to "How to Survive". I scoured the net
to find the development history behind “How to Survive” and I couldn’t find
anything of it besides it being announced by 505 out of the blue in May, months
after our Kickstarter campaign had ended. I don't speak French, but I did try my
best to do my homework before posting a statement.

In my mind during the chain of events: 505games contacted Roam about publishing,
Roam declined, 505games went and found someone to make "Roam".

What might’ve actually happened: 505games contacted Roam about publishing, Roam
declined, so 505games went to Ekosoft and picked up their "Monster Island".
This is fair.

"Regardless of platform - people's gaming habits aren't going to change just
because there's a new platform," he said. "We have an enormous amount of players
who are more in the casual game space, but they play a lot,"
Infinity Ward executive producer Mark Rubin tells IGN. "It's kind of a weird, ironic thing to say; They aren't hardcore gamers, or
even gamers, but they play Call of Duty every night. And those guys are going to
continue to play regardless of platform. So I think not only will we continue to
engage with that existing player base, but we'll take next gen and see how far
we can go with it." Thanks
HARDOCP.

Other titles benefit, too: Sniper Elite V2 performance increases by up to 19%,
DiRT Showdown performance by up to 13%, Metro: Last Light performance by up to
9%, Sleeping Dogs performance by up to 9%, Max Payne 3 performance by up to 9%,
and F1 2012 performance by up to 6%.

GeForce 331.65 WHQL also sees the introduction of
GeForce Experience 1.7,
which includes the long-awaited ShadowPlay Beta, an innovative gameplay
recording tool that can constantly record the action with a minimal performance
impact thanks to the H.264 encoder built into GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Series
GPUs. For full details about ShadowPlay, and other new features of GeForce
Experience 1.7, please check out our
GeForce Experience 1.7 launch story.

A new
GFK Chart-Track chart shows the 20 bestselling full-price PC games in the
U.K. for the week ending October 26th, showing the debut of The Sims 3: Into the
Future knocks The Sims 3 out of the top spot, and Rocksmith 2014 Edition enters
at number three. The
all-platforms all prices chart is also new, here's word on that:

The
third installment in Warner’s Batman: Arkham series debuts at No1 (as did the
previous two), entitled ‘Batman: Arkham Origins’ (developed in-house by WB Games
Montreal) and sells almost exactly the same in week 1 as the first in the series
‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’ (Sep 2009, developed by Rocksteady, published by Eidos).

The defining title in terms of week 1 sales was the second in the series
‘Batman: Arkham City’ (Oct 2011 with close to double the week 1 sales of the
third installment, also developed by Rocksteady, published by Warner). The
all-time best-selling Batman game in the UK is ‘Lego Batman: The Videogame’ from
2008 (published by Warner, developed by Traveller’s Tales). Rockstar/Take 2’s
‘GTA V’ (-28%) drops to No2 followed at No3 by EA’s ‘FIFA 14’ (-21%) and at No4
by Activision’s ‘Skylanders Swap Force’ (-50%). 2 titles climb back in to the
Top 10 this week thanks to a successful hardware promotion: Warner’s ‘Lego The
Lord of the Rings’ climbs 11 places to No8 (+266%) and Mind Candy’s ‘Moshi
Monsters: Katsuma Unleashed’ climbs 20 places to No9 (+350%). Ubisoft debut at
No15 with ‘Rocksmith 2014 Edition’, EA debut at No18 with ‘The Sims 3: Into the
Future’ and Activision debut at No27 with ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles’.

I thought I was frustrated with our
football picks league
before, but that's nothing compared with how upset I am with myself after
yesterday. I mentioned someone sending me the picks their computer program was
generating, and last week I changed one pick last week because of it, which
turned out to be a winner. Well, this week the computer and I disagreed on four
picks, and still being in the frame of mind that I was doing poorly, I
changed three of my picks as a result: I kept the Giants to beat the Eagles, but
decided to take the computer's advice on three games, changing my picks on
Dallas, Atlanta, and Miami. If I'd stuck with my original choices I would have
only lost on the Steelers so far, and would be 11-1, but by changing, I am 8-4. The silliest part is that I just got
caught up in how the computer would
do, but had those teams all won, I would not be proud since it would have
been the outside help succeeding, so letting the computer influence me was sort
of a lose/lose scenario. Lesson learned. And thus Mr. Loser laments.